Crocodile of the Motherboard

2002

Viper of the Motherboard

2005

Kabbalah of the Motherboard (Ain)

2005

The subject painted can be depictions of the counting of Geomancy, the layers of Kabbalistic achievement, the Evil Eye of Witchcraft dispelled for the Medieval Pagan. A Judaeo-Christian allegory defines new lusts as coiling serpents from Hell are covered with the crude communication psychosis of Cyberland. In Internetland sex is only display, (no stroking) as cold as the stars, the throb of more gold for the depicted bodies the only relief. Between the shiny sharp circuitry points and digital diagrams, these spiritual images mollify a fear of the unknown, a miasma of the void.

The image, sometimes a fanciful chimera, tarot card queen or long lost Goddess, is caught inside between this real object and the new virtual world. Every meaning has no meaning in our Postmodern spiritual vacuum as images and words can mimic higher thought and base curiosity in the same instant. I give you an amulet, a talisman, as you are now, a computed entity in a computed process, this digital system now living as we do, alive within us, now all universal travellers in space and time.

Alexis Hunter 2005

Realising Gentileshi

Performance
Bottaccio Galleries
Hyde Park
London
2002

Gentileschi's paintings surfaced again with the emergence of the Woman’s Art History Movement of the 1970s or ‘Herstory’ as we called it then in London. I always felt that to the predominantly Marxist Feminists that Artemesia was too “out there” with her need to market her paintings to support herself and her family and her use of luxurious clothes, apart from her graphic, in-your-face violence. It was not until the Royal Academy put on the show Carravaggio and His Followers that I finally came face to face with the actual painting that had so impressed me as a young student.

The ruby red blood glistened and spurted out of the picture-plane with such virtuosity it made the subject, the slicing of a human head from the neck with a sword, even more horribly cruel. A terrible super realism was created and it was not surprising this painting had been hidden away for over a century. She made several versions until finally reworking the subject into an intense spectacle of pure and almost pornographic violence making Carravaggio’s over-posed and thinly painted, gruff works, pale in comparison.

She was a huge influence on my work, through the Approach to Fear narrative photographs in the use of paring, slicing and burning to represent radical change and liberation, to the large emblematic figures in the oil painting series. Watching the BBC TV documentary on the court case papers I felt it sad that we know so little of her professional life as a successful artist. A new French film has been heavily criticised on the Internet for giving a romantic shine to her victimisation. The opportunity has arisen for me to redress what I feel is the loss to history of her actual working life, by creating a little vignette of her studio in the Courts of Europe, by the wonderful opportunity from Bottaccio Galleries of an exhibition in the Grand Gallery, 9 Grosvenor Place, Hyde Park, London. I hope you will be able to come to this exhibition in September 2002."        Alexis Hunter

Theatre sets made at the Camden Falcon Theatre in 1985

slide projection on white drapes to signify the subconscious